Try to jump as high as you can. Bend your knees. Now jump!

No matter how hard you try, or how high you jump, you always come back down again. Something called gravity pulls you back down. Gravity holds you down on Earth. Without gravity, you would fly off into space. You would jump up and just keep on going. That might sound like fun, but you could not live very high up. For one thing, you need to breathe air. The higher you go, the less air there is. You need gravity to keep you down on Earth. WHAT IS GRAVITY? Gravity is a force that pulls two objects toward each other. The force is also called gravitation. The bigger an object is, the stronger its gravity. Small objects, and even cars and buildings, have so little gravity that you cant feel their pull. Huge objects like Earth, however, are a different story. Earth is so much bigger than you that its gravity makes you stick to the ground. Earth is bigger than the Moon. Earths gravity pulls on the Moon. That is why the Moon orbits, or goes around, Earth. The Sun is bigger than Earth. Its gravity makes Earth go around the Sun. Earths gravity pulls toward the center of Earth. Gravity holds the oceans and the atmosphere on Earth. The Suns gravity pulls toward the center of the Sun. It holds the Sun together. WHO DISCOVERED GRAVITY? Gravity has always been around. In ancient times, people tried to explain why things fall toward Earth. An English scientist named Sir Isaac Newton came up with a great idea about gravity in 1687. He thought about how an apple falls and wondered how far gravity went. He came up with the idea that gravity does more than hold people on Earth. Newton thought of gravity as a kind of mysterious force pulling objects together. He said that gravity holds the Moon in orbit around Earth. It holds the planets in orbit around the Sun. Newtons ideas on gravitation explained many things about how apples fall and how stars and planets move.
Earth is our planet. It is a huge ball of rock that travels in space around the Sun. It also slowly spins around. At any one moment, only half of Earth faces the Sun. The side facing the Sun has day, and the other side has night. It taIt takes Earth one year, or about 365 days, to go once around the Sun. Earths orbitthe path it follows around the Sunis close to the shape of a circle.kes 24 hours for Earth to spin aroGreenland is the largest island in the world. It has a land area of about 836,000 square miles (2,166,000 square kilometers). Greenland is anything but green! It is MMpund once.